Food/Production/Commerce Domestic "Trade Routes"

Hi!

I have kind of suggested this idea in brief before (#15 in http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=527545). But here I want to elaborate on possible implementation.

The idea

The idea is as follows (I will provide example for food, but the same can apply to production and maybe commerce though the later is more questionable)...

You have a highly agricultural City A producing lots of (perhaps even growing too quickly, leading to ). You also have City B with very small food yields (perhaps due to terrain or other reasons, mostly terrain of course). It only would make sense in real life to send some of the surplus from A to B.

How can it be implemented?

I think as 2 or 3 sliders in the city screen (2 if only food and production are implemented, and 3 if commerce is also implemented). The default value would be 0 - meaning no food is being sent or requested. A negative value can mean food being sent, and a positive one - food being requested (or vise-versa - whichever makes more sense).

Now, the values themselves can represent the actual "food points/grain bags" or "hammers" - not the raw ones, but the "computed final" ones, i.e. after all modifiers. However there is a caveat, that while City A can certainly send these "processed" (i.e. "food points" with modifiers applied) food to City B, City B should not be able to process these any further. So, basically these received "food points" cannot have any extra modifiers applied (otherwise this can lead too inflating food supply indefinitely by sending it from city to city), and are basically added to the city's food output after all modifiers have been applied.

So, for example, City A has a surplus of +10 food points, and City B is requesting food (slider value +5). If City A decides to send some of its surplus, then obviously it will have less food for itself, so that if it is sending out 7 food points (slider value -7), then it will have the remaining surplus of only 3 food points (10-7), hence slower growth rate for it.

How does the game decide which city it sends what amount of food to the other city? Possibly simply by distance. There can also be additional civic or other modifiers for this whole business, so that the bigger the distance the less food/hammers are available at the destination and/or it costs some money per turn.

This is just the basic idea on implementation. Of course it requires more thought and polishing. But I think it will for sure add more realism and depth to the game play, making it more balanced.

This makes me think of Civ 2's caravans. A simpler method would be to build a food caravan, subtracting bread from the local stores, and sending it to a city more in need, directly adding to its food stores. Naturally, such a unit would be completely non-combatant.

Arakhor said:

This makes me think of Civ 2's caravans. A simpler method would be to build a food caravan, subtracting bread from the local stores, and sending it to a city more in need, directly adding to its food stores. Naturally, such a unit would be completely non-combatant.

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But this requires a LOT of unnecessary micromanagement. Imagine if you have to do it for not 2 but 20 cities and not just for food...

In addition this is very different from the mechanic I am proposing. A caravn type unit - is a one time thing, similar to the current Trade Caran unit. What I am suggesting is a continuous, on-going thing. Whereby every turn there will be transfer of grain bags and hammers as per the slider settings.

The Caravans and Freights (and the soon to come Traders) already do the "caravan uses food to be built and can give food to target city". Yes it's extra micromanagement but it's already in the mod.

New features like that require new coding, possibly difficult (I've no idea in that regard).
Mostly this would apply to the Reneissance era and beyond, and there need to be a way to make the traded food degrade with distance (possibly reducing such degradation with specific techs, eg Refrigeration).

I swear there was a mod that let you do this once upon a time. I didn't find the mechanic that interesting and it made the game a lot more tedious.

Afforess said:

I swear there was a mod that let you do this once upon a time. I didn't find the mechanic that interesting and it made the game a lot more tedious.

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You mean this one?
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=333270

Food redistribution is definitely something that the game lacks...

The thread in which Afforess was the first to reply?

Arakhor said:

The thread in which Afforess was the first to reply?

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What a difference five years had wrought! That first post by Afforess was in 2009. Now I'm assuming Afforess is older and wiser to what can be good for gameplay balance .

Arakhor said:

The thread in which Afforess was the first to reply?

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That's the ticket! I still scour other forums for good ideas.

Afforess said:

I swear there was a mod that let you do this once upon a time. I didn't find the mechanic that interesting and it made the game a lot more tedious.

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That's surprising to me. I think I'd really enjoy being able to send food and/or production around.

In particular, I'd love to be able to build a little village in a location where lots of food was available but was otherwise not very interesting/useful; farm the area, and then send food to the capital at the rivermouth nearby. If city maintenance cost was largely determined by population (and possibly the buildings in them) rather than city count, we could end up with a much more realistic situation where you have just a few large cities (with lots of buildings in them), and many more small towns scattered through your empire. The towns just gather nearby resources and have only the basic services (buildings). You should be able to build little towns without fear of collapsing your economy, and should not expect all settlements to become enormous powerhouses as is the case now.

I can see it now, my lovely empire... Lots of farming villages in the plains around the lake and over near the sea where the grass is green. A major industrial city lies where the river leaves the hills; this city is most productive because it contains several Factory buildings, which provide specialist slots for Workers, who provide production in the form of "Shields" (which are no longer principally sourced from working mines). This industrial city is currently the only city in my empire with the expensive Tank Factory, allowing it to build tanks. It imports lots of food from the nearby farms to feed the factory workers. Further down the river, at the sea, is my capital, which has Universities, Libraries, music and culture, religious temples, trade buildings, and all the grand administrative buildings which the capital of a major Empire should have. Up in a mountain valley, an old mining town has been slowly growing, and has just built a steel mill, to refine the ore it mines nearby. It'll probably develop further industry of its own, eventually. On an island offshore, I've built a thriving fishing industry (buildings which increase food such as the fishermans' huts); this town also sends food home to the capital. Recently a village was founded in a valley leading to a strategically important mountain pass: a rival civilisation might be tempted to send an army through that pass, so this new town is being developed with defensive structures and military support infrastructure such as a military airfield.

Too hard? I think it'd be awesome!

aggri1 said:

That's surprising to me. I think I'd really enjoy being able to send food and/or production around. (...)

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You are not alone with it, but the devs for some reason seem to have no interest in it.

aggri1 said:

That's surprising to me. I think I'd really enjoy being able to send food and/or production around.

In particular, I'd love to be able to build a little village in a location where lots of food was available but was otherwise not very interesting/useful; farm the area, and then send food to the capital at the rivermouth nearby. If city maintenance cost was largely determined by population (and possibly the buildings in them) rather than city count, we could end up with a much more realistic situation where you have just a few large cities (with lots of buildings in them), and many more small towns scattered through your empire. The towns just gather nearby resources and have only the basic services (buildings). You should be able to build little towns without fear of collapsing your economy, and should not expect all settlements to become enormous powerhouses as is the case now.

I can see it now, my lovely empire... Lots of farming villages in the plains around the lake and over near the sea where the grass is green. A major industrial city lies where the river leaves the hills; this city is most productive because it contains several Factory buildings, which provide specialist slots for Workers, who provide production in the form of "Shields" (which are no longer principally sourced from working mines). This industrial city is currently the only city in my empire with the expensive Tank Factory, allowing it to build tanks. It imports lots of food from the nearby farms to feed the factory workers. Further down the river, at the sea, is my capital, which has Universities, Libraries, music and culture, religious temples, trade buildings, and all the grand administrative buildings which the capital of a major Empire should have. Up in a mountain valley, an old mining town has been slowly growing, and has just built a steel mill, to refine the ore it mines nearby. It'll probably develop further industry of its own, eventually. On an island offshore, I've built a thriving fishing industry (buildings which increase food such as the fishermans' huts); this town also sends food home to the capital. Recently a village was founded in a valley leading to a strategically important mountain pass: a rival civilisation might be tempted to send an army through that pass, so this new town is being developed with defensive structures and military support infrastructure such as a military airfield.

Too hard? I think it'd be awesome!

Click to expand...

I suppose this type of organization would require a lot of new strategies for the AI to consider as well. If this way of laying out your empire is effective, then the AI needs to be able to plan in a similar way.
It then should probably also be able to recognize an important farming area close to an enemy's border as crucial to the empire and put emphasis on defending that spot.

But I agree that the idea sounds really cool

If someone wants to ModMod that, go right ahead. I for one would prefer it be left out.
Getting the AI to know what the hey is going on would be hard enough, and I don't want to deal with the extra micromanaging. Civilization IV was a good balance between that, not needing to babysit every little detail every turn just so your civilization doesn't collapse between turns, like in some other strategy games I've tried.

Sounds cool on paper, but it doesn't seem like something I'd find fun in practice.

I t would not necessary need extra micro management if designed in the right way.

But I really doubt it is doable as a modmod. I guess it would require dll work.



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Two other things I miss from RAND:
-Pollution as a new challenge in the Industrial+Modern eras
-Crime

I know C2C has both, but I don't like the way they work (over-complicated and memory wasting, imo).